Oh Poetry!

Bees, snails, and peacock tails by Betsy Franco and Steve Jenkins

From cover to cover of Bees, snails, and peacock this book has creative designs, uses a great deal of color, and has words that are large and small, and some of the text forms shapes. The colorful illustrations in this book really drew me in but I also enjoyed reading the poetry. Most pictures continue across both pages and each picture goes along with the text. For example, one page talks about ants being able to carry food on their back and so the illustration is of ants walking towards a watermelon. This makes the story cleverer. Children will be able to learn the names of animals and objects by matching the words to the pictures. I also liked this story because some of the information is factual such as star fish having five arms and “eyespots” that help them move around. After the story ends, there are two pages dedicated to giving a little bit of information about each animal. Older children could look at these pages to discover more about the creatures.
My only suggestion to this book is to fix the ending. The poem concludes by saying that creatures make patterns and shapes naturally. But, this could be better worded or the ending could be changed.

I Did It Because…How A Poem Happens by Loris Lesynski

“I Did It Because…” How a Poem Happens is full of energy and enthusiasm, and crazy made up words that are simply creative. What’s great about this book is that it is divided into sections on how a poem happens such as poem prep, sounds and wordplay, and inspiration sparks. After each section there are poems that use the ideas from that section. This enables children to learn how they can work towards writing a poem with these strategies. The book teaches children how certain sounds can come together to form rhythms and shows that poems can be written about anything. Any idea can form a poem from describing a pizza to telling others about you.
Each poem is illustrated with a picture that represents the poem. If you glance at these illustrations you will be intrigued to read the wacky, crazy, different, but fun poems in this collection.
The poem that touched me the most is titled “I Look in the Mirror.” The ending of this poem is “Look at me closely with all of your eyes—and all you will see is my perfect disguise.” This means that there is a difference between truly knowing a person and just looking at them from the outside. To find out more about someone else, you need to make an effort to get to know him and understand who he is. Messages like this are important for children to hear.